The widow of Michael Mosley has said she wants to “honour his work” and ensure his legacy is to make it “much easier for people to live a healthier life”.
Mosley, whose broadcasting career focused on helping people improve their health, died last month aged 67, while on holiday in Greece.
Dr Clare Bailey said her husband “would have been gobsmacked” by the scale of the public response to his death.
In an interview on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Bailey, a GP turned health columnist and author, said her husband’s legacy “had real value”.
“I’m still breath-taken by the response from people around the country, across the world, and it’s just extraordinary. He was quite a quiet, humble man and to have that response is just extraordinary. And I hope we can find some really positive changes going forward.”
Bailey said she was only just beginning to read the huge volume of letters that came in after his death from fans of his work and that she found it “so uplifting” to hear the difference he made to people’s lives.
“One of the tributes that I [read] was: ‘I honestly never felt so sad about the passing of someone I don’t actually know. I feel I’ve lost a friend.’ And I think that kind of somehow encapsulates how he connected with people,” she said.
Bailey, who wrote recipe books to go alongside her husband’s diet books, said of his legacy: “We want to honour his work…I have this sense that his legacy has real value.
“Nutrition is not taught consistently at medical school, still. And so there are so many gaps there that can be improved across the board using the latest evidence and making it much easier for people to live a healthier life.”
When asked what he would have made of the scale of the response, she said: “He would have been gobsmacked. He didn’t seek the limelight, he was quite shy but he loved what he did and was very good at it.”
Moseley’s BBC Radio 4 show, Just One Thing, used a simple tip per episode to improve the nation’s health and he promoted intermittent fasting as a way to tackle weight gain.
Describing the impact of his advice, and how he lived it, she said: “We’re all standing on one leg and I’m doing cold showers. Mike did cold showers. He made a lot of noise about it – he sung loudly and annoyingly, but rather tunefully.”